epic

if we're to sleep in the beds we've made for ourselves, pray someone offers a couch.

men are too men to admit when they're ashamed.

what will we do with your sadness? she wants to know
only when i smile to make her feel better, silhouettes of bats and ravens fly across the brown of my eye, and startled she jumps back.

when i pray it is never to thwart the tragedy, but to have legs (and will) enough to outrun it.
perhaps that says everything right there.

our mothers and fathers held hands and put rainbows into one another's bodies to start our engines. and we grew like vines and soft-spoken pandemonium, till we were born and wrapped in blankets, delicate handfuls of lily petals altogether the size of loaves of bread, and our fathers nursed our crying hellos and named us Bobs and Bills and Sarahs and Janes and maybe even kicked around a birthday or two before eventually heading off to remember us once again on a couch or long distance drive or nursing home death-bed many moons hence.
___and like all solemnity we grew and shed identities like snake-skins until at 27, 35, 42
___the inevitability of normalcy eventually crystallizes when one morning we sing the songs
___the radio dictates on our way to our whatever-job whatever-operation whatever-cause of death.

when i grow up i'm going to be a prophet,
they will mock me and curse me, but i will say my piece:

i will sneak around at night and chant flying dinosaurs back into the ears of once-were dreamers and declare it time for lovers to give each other ultimatums: so that we meet halfway between your heart and mine, and we find words enough to last us a dinner and we f*ck hard enough to sweat or by Jove, we drag the failure out the front of our suburbanite homes and bludgeon them to death with the blunt end of a spatula,
___i'll grab heads and slam them into the walls till they remember posters of Ferrari's and jets and muscle-cars that once breathed life into their bedrooms, one morning, where the occasionally bloodied body of failed spouses leak their bloodied sorrys down the gutters, thousands of 4-door sedans will go up in blazes, when over-weight mothers of two named Darlene and Sharon and Rosary flick matches into front seats soaked with gasoline and filled with beauty magazines and old VHS pornos and their sons' good-enough-to-be-average B+s and 81%s and stand back finally smoking the joint and sipping the rum they've forcefully avoided for decades.

children will rebuild the carousels and slides and swings that gangs and law-suit-fearing councils removed.

ordinary teens will open their pill bottles and notice for once and maybe even (cross-your-fingers) finally that the little fairies within their chemicals have long since died and these two fossils i take twice a day with water are the dead crusts and rough teeth of magic that alchemy denied us.

and mad and depressed and unmedicated and violent and drunk and plastered and enraged and horny and confused and lost and with voices in our heads and electricity in our brains we'll storm the streets and burn khaki pants and mid-season sales and standardized tests and prenuptial agreements where we find them. the midgets will find giants to dress as their jesters and the nerds will sport leather jackets and teach the jocks to pronounce Aeschylus while they drop acid and have threesomes and while the jocks will divine a new geometry.

as for hopes:
those our parents entrusted to us,
those we woke up after 3 hours sleep and with raw eyes and tirelessly faught for,

those whose hearts stopped in wars and car accidents
and discretionary marking and job reviews

those that arson gave back to the soil behind our backs,
those that we realized were beyond us:
___barred by inadequate minds
___start-up capital
___height and weight restrictions

those that arson gave back to apathy within our chests,
and charred and spitting ash we called our mothers to say we're fine mom and smiled to avoid questions from our wives and children, (while smoke signals drift out our noses, and our lips are ashed)

a rage, a plague, a torment upon such will be my religion.
and like Prometheus they will bind me and tie me to the top of a car and leave me like a cockroach pinned to a wall for the summer heat to molest.

and like Prometheus i'll be sorry i tried to defend this life.

and our mothers will smell the blankets we were born in for the scent of lily our skin once had.
then they'll knock on our doors and find us lying under our coffee tables with the lights off. staring at nothing and lacking energy to dream and quoting Beckett in response to every question, holding pens the way one holds chopsticks and using chopsticks to draw lines in the sand we know mean nothing by tomorrow morning.

goodnight.
and
good

luck___:

since god knows nothing else has the might to play chess with fortune.

sing me my pavanne,

i do not know how many of Milton's paradises have become lost for me.

___